My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria is a storytelling game inspired by My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. It's mostly geared towards children and has very simple rules and mechanics. It is publised by River Horse.
The website for it can be found here: My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria -- River Horse
Released articles include:
Rule books
- My Little Pony Tails of Equestria: The Storytelling Game: The core rulebook that includes everything to know about the gameplay, three playable races (earth ponies, unicorns and pegasi) and the starter adventure "The Pet Predicament".
- The Bestiary of Equestria: This book includes a bestiary of creatures and characters for game masters to use, new playable races and instuctions for creating your own creatures.
- The Official Movie Sourcebook: A supplemental rulebook that adds new mechanics, races, monsters and the adventure "The Beasts of Black Skull Island". Everything is themed around playing outside of Equestria, based on the characters and places from My Little Pony: The Movie (2017).
Packages
- The Curse of the Statuettes: Tails of Equestria Adventure Pack: This includes a set of dice, the adventure "The Curse of the Statuettes", a Game Master screen and a pad of character sheets.
- Starter Set: This includes a set of dice, the adventure "A Dragon's Bounty", 4 stands for dragon and pony characters, pre-made character sheets, cardboard tokens and character standees and two poster maps.
Adventure books
- The Festival of Lights: This adventure takes place right after The Curse of the Statuettes.
- Judge Not by the Cover: An adventure taking place in the Crystal Empire
- The Haunting of Equestria
- Filly Sized Follies
- Melody of the Waves
- The Curious Case of the Malfunctioning P.R.A.N.C.E.R. ... and Other Tails(June 2020): An anthology of six adventures.
Tropes appearing in Tails of Equestria are:
- Anti-Frustration Features: The friendship token system allows players to pay one or more tokens in order to make challenges easier or instantly win them.
- Armor and Magic Don't Mix: Armor downgrades the flying and telekinesis skills of pegasi and unicorns.
- Ascended Extra: The Lizard Folk. Background characters who don't even get a representative in the Movie are a playable race here.
- Beneath the Earth: The setting of Festival of Lights is an extensive Underdark-like underworld.
- Bird People: Humanoid parrots are one of the playable races.
- Blob Monster: Oozes, divided into lesser and greater variants, are blobs of acidic, semi-living slime created as a side-effect of magical activity. They mindlessly creep towards nearby organic matter, which they dissolve and incorporate into themselves.
- Butterfly of Death and Rebirth: The Sporedust Butterfly in Festival of Lights restores the Agaricus forest to its former beauty after the oozes are defeated.
- Canon Foreigner: While the game contains lots of characters and creatures from the series, it also has many new ones.
- Character Customization: You are encouraged to draw your own character on your pony sheet.
- Character Level: Every time you complete an adventure, your character levels up by one level.
- Chest Monster: Mimics hunt by disguising themselves as inviting objects, such as treasure chests, doors and chairs, and waiting for people to come close enough to attack.
- Classy Cat-Burglar: Quite literally, the playable cat race is described as roguish.
- Cool Horse: Since most of the playable races are equine, the player characters tend to be Cool Horses.
- Crossover: The Bestiary of Equestria includes some well known creatures from Dungeons & Dragons (Wizards of the Coast being owned by Hasbro), such as the Flumph or the Mimic.
- Damage Reduction: There are different type of armor with this ability in the core rulebook.
- Easing into the Adventure: Downplayed. The default "first adventure", The Pet Predicament, starts out with pet sitting, but soon the Player Characters have to go into Everfree Forest.
- Elemental Embodiment: Elemental creatures include bol-dars (highly sedentary living boulders) and kindlings (small creatures of living flame that occasionally wander towards the surface world from regions of eternal fire deep underground).
- Elite Mooks: The greater ooze is essentially just a stronger, tougher version of the lesser ooze.
- Feathered Serpent: Sky serpents are relatives of sea serpents with a pair of feathered wings.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Discord notes on his own profile in the bestiary.
- Giant Enemy Crab: Carcinuses are crabs the size of office buildings. They mostly live deep beneath the ocean, but occasionally attack coastal cities.
- Giant Spider: Giant spiders are included in the bestiary. They live deep underground by preference, and detest both fire and bright light. They often live in large nests of colonies led by a larger queen. They are the main antagonists of The Festival of Lights when the spider-queen Insidira decides that she's tired of ruling only over caverns and decides to take over the Underground City of Umberfoal and then move on to the surface world.
- Guest-Star Party Member: Moonbeam and Professor Trotter can become this in The Festival of Lights if you still have them around from The Curse of the Statuettes.
- Kidnapping Bird of Prey: Parodied with the Mohawk in The Pet Predicament. It didn't kidnap Gummy the alligator but Gummy bit the bird and now couldn't let loose because the bird is flying so high.
- Lighter and Softer: Compared to the unofficial Ponyfinder, Tails has much simpler rules and much less dark and violent plots.
- Loads and Loads of Races: While the core rulebook started out with only three races, they get more with every new rulebook:
- The core book included earth ponies, pegasi and unicorns.
- The bestiary adds dragons, crystal ponies, changelings, griffons, buffalo and diamond dogs.
- The movie sourcebook adds cats, parrots, hippogriffs and Lizard Folk.
- Master of None: Changelings can imitate anyone they can see, but are weak in all stats (d4s, the lowest possible), to represent their ability to do many things but lack of specialization.
- Mushroom Man: The Agari are small humanoid mushrooms that live in forests.
- Never Say "Die": When characters run out of stamina, they simply faint instead of dying.
- Our Dragons Are Different:
- Dragons are a playable race and a type of monster. Like in the show, they're a civilized race that start out not much stronger than ponies.
- There's also the bookwyrm from the bestiary, a dragon made out of book pages. They're summoned into existence using magic, and are given a single command that their existence then revolves completely around following. Once their task is done, they cease to exist.
- Our Gryphons Are Different: Griffons and hippogriffs are among the playable races.
- Our Hydras Are Different: In addition to the swamp-dwelling kind from the cartoon, there are also gloombrine hydras, which have fish tails instead of legs and live deep in the ocean.
- Painting the Medium: The entries for Discord and Trixie in the Bestiary contain handwritten notes by those characters.
- Projectile Webbing: Giant Spiders can produce and sling around webbing during combat to entangle foes.
- Pun-Based Creature:
- Mohawks are rebellious, noise-loving birds of prey with flamboyant, brightly colored crests.
- Bookwyrms are dragons made out of paper, ink and book bindings, and summoned in a ritual conducted using books or scrolls.
- The Clearcall Forest is home to literal pine martens, with wooden legs, pine needles for fur and pinecones for ears.
- Rocs are made out of living rock, with stone slabs for feathers.
- Rock Monster:
- The Roc is a giant bird with stone slabs for feathers.
- Bol-dars resemble lumpy, living boulders with short limbs, and spend most of their lives lying around doing nothing at all.
- Spell Crafting: Homebrewing talents and quirks is encouraged by the core rulebook.
- Summon Magic: Bookwyrms are created by being summoned into existence from a pile of written material.
- Taken for Granite: The main premise of The Curse of the Statuettes. The magic involved is also important in The Festival of Lights.
- Winged Unicorn: Alicorns are not playable, but there are stats for all of the princesses in the bestiary.
